ghastly honeycomb somewhere, and it's up to us to get busy with the
concrete mixers--and to do it quickly. I can't imagine what Braithwaite
was thinking of; to drive this tunnel through one of nature's compost
heaps, and then to turn a stream of water through it."
The sun was a fiery globe swinging down to the sky-pitched western
horizon when the Kentuckian picked his way out of the dripping caverns.
There were two added lines in the frown wrinkling between his eyes, and
he was still talking to himself in terms of discouragement. At a
conservative estimate three months of time and many thousands of dollars
must be spent in lining the spillway tunnel with a steel tube, and in
plugging the caverns of the hollow tooth with concrete. And in any one
of the ninety days the water might find its increasing way through the
"compost heap"; whereupon the devastating end would come swiftly.
It was disheartening from every point of view. Ballard knew nothing of
the financial condition of the Arcadia Company, but he guessed shrewdly
that Mr. Pelham would be reluctant to put money into work that could not
be seen and celebrated with the beating of drums. None the less, for the
safety of every future land buyer with holdings below the great dam, the
work must be done. Otherwise----
The chief engineer's clean-cut face was still wearing the harassed scowl
when Bromley, returning with the excursionists, saw it again.
"The grouch is all yours," said the cheerful one, comfortingly, "and you
have a good right and title to it. It's been a hard day for you. Is the
arm hurting like sin?"
"No; not more than it has to. But something else is. Listen, Bromley."
And he briefed the story of the hollow-tooth promontory for the
assistant.
"Great ghosts!--worse and more of it!" was Bromley's comment. Then he
added: "I've seen a queer thing, too, Breckenridge: the colonel has
moved out, vanished, taken to the hills."
"Out of Castle 'Cadia? You're mistaken. There is absolutely nothing
doing at the big house: I've been reconnoitring with the glass."
"No, I didn't mean that," was the qualifying rejoinder. "I mean the
ranch outfit down in the Park. It's gone. You know the best grazing at
this time of the year is along the river: well, you won't find hair,
hoof or horn of the colonel's cattle anywhere in the bottom lands--not a
sign of them. Also, the ranch itself is deserted and the corrals are all
open."
The harassed scowl would have taken on other added lines if there had
been room for them.
"What do you make of it, Loudon?--what does it mean?"
"You can search me," was the puzzled reply. "But while you're doing it,
you can bet high that it means something. To a man up a tall tree it
looks as if the colonel were expecting a flood. Why should he expect it?
What does he know?--more than we know?"
"It's another of the cursed mysteries," Ballard broke out in sullen
anger. "It's enough to jar a man's sanity!"
"Mine was screwed a good bit off its base a long time ago," Bromley
confessed. Then he came back to the present and its threatenings: "I'd
give a month's pay if we had this crazy city crowd off of our hands and
out of the Park."
"We'll get rid of it pretty early. I've settled that with Mr. Pelham. To
get his people back to Denver by breakfast-time to-morrow, the trains
will have to leave here between eight and eight-thirty."
"That is good news--as far as it goes. Will you tell Mr. Pelham about
the rotten tooth--to-night, I mean?"
"I certainly shall," was the positive rejoinder; and an hour later, when
the evening luncheon in the big mess-tent had been served, and the crowd
was gathered on the camp mesa to wait for the fireworks, Ballard got the
president into the bungalow office, shut the door on possible
interruptions, and laid bare the discouraging facts.
Singularly enough, as he thought, the facts seemed to make little
impression upon the head of Arcadia Irrigation. Mr. Pelham sat back in
Macpherson's home-made easy-chair, relighted his cigar, and refused to
be disturbed or greatly interested. Assuming that he had not made the
new involvement plain enough, Ballard went over the situation again.
"Another quarter of a million will be needed," he summed up, "and we
shouldn't lose a single day in beginning. As I have said, there seems to
be considerable seepage through the hill already, with less than half of
the working head of water behind the dam. What it will be under a full
head, no man can say."
"Oh, I don't know," said the president, easily. "A new boat always leaks
a little. The cracks, if there are any, will probably silt up in a few
days--or weeks."
"That is a possibility," granted the engineer; "but it is scarcely one
upon which we have a right to depend. From what the secretary of the
company said in his speech to-day, I gathered that the lands under the
lower line of the ditch will be put upon the market immediately; that
settlers may begin to locate and purchase at once. That must not be
done, Mr. Pelham."
"Why not?"
"Because any man who would buy and build in the bottom lands before we
have filled that hollow tooth would take his life in his hands."
The president's smile was blandly genial.
"You've been having a pretty strenuous day of it, Mr. Ballard, and I can
make allowances. Things will look brighter after you have had a good
night's rest. And how about that arm? I didn't quite understand how you
came to hurt it. Nothing serious, I hope?"
"The arm is all right," said Ballard, brusquely. Mr. Pelham's effort to
change the subject was too crude and it roused a spirit of bulldog
tenacity in the younger man. "You will pardon me if I go back to the
original question. What are we going to do about that undermined hill?"
The president rose and dusted the cigar-ash from his coat-sleeve.
"Just at present, Mr. Ballard, we shall do nothing. To-morrow morning
you may put your entire force on the ditch work, discharging the various
camps as soon as the work is done. Let the 'hollow tooth' rest for the
time. If a mistake has been made, it's not your mistake--or Mr.
Bromley's. And a word in your ear: Not a syllable of your very natural
anxiety to any one, if you please. It can do no good; and it might do a
great deal of harm. I shouldn't mention it even to Bromley, if I were
you."
"Not mention it?--to Bromley? But Bromley knows; and we agree fully----"
"Well, see to it that he doesn't talk. And now I must really beg to be
excused, Mr. Ballard. My duties as host----"
Ballard let him go, with a feeling of repulsive disgust that was almost
a shudder, and sat for a brooding hour in silence while the fireworks
sputtered and blazed from the platform on the mesa's edge and the full
moon rose to peer over the background range, paling the reds and yellows
of the rockets and bombs. He was still sitting where the president had
left him when Bromley came in to announce the close of the _fete
champetre_.
"It's all over but the shouting, and they are taking to the Pullmans.
You don't care to go to the foot of the pass with one of the trains, do
you?"
"Not if you'll go. One of us ought to stay by the dam while the lake is
filling, and I'm the one."
"Of course you are," said Bromley, cheerfully. "I'll go with the first
section; I'm good for that much more, I guess; and I can come back from
Ackerman's ranch in the morning on one of the returning engines." Then
he asked the question for which Ballard was waiting: "How did Mr. Pelham
take the new grief?"
"He took it too easily; a great deal too easily, Loudon. I tell you,
there's something rotten in Denmark. He was as cold-blooded as a fish."
Hoskins, long since reinstated, and now engineman of the first section
of the excursion train, was whistling for orders, and Bromley had to go.
"I've heard a thing or two myself, during the day," he averred. "I'll
tell you about them in the morning. The company's secretary has been
busy making stock transfers all day--when he wasn't spellbinding from
some platform or other. There is something doing--something that the
baa-lambs don't suspect. And Mr. Pelham and his little inside ring are
doing it."
Ballard got up and went to the door with the assistant.
"And that isn't the worst of it, Loudon," he said, with an air of sudden
and vehement conviction. "This isn't an irrigation scheme at all, it's a
stock deal from beginning to end. Mr. Pelham knows about that hollow
tooth; he knew about it before I told him. You mark my words: we'll
never get orders to plug that tunnel!"
Bromley nodded agreement. "I've been working my way around to that, too.
All right; so let it be. My resignation goes in to-morrow morning, and I
take it yours will?"
"It will, for a fact; I've been half sorry I didn't saw it off short
with Mr. Pelham when I had him here. Good-night. Don't let them persuade
you to go over the pass. Stop at Ackerman's, and get what sleep you
can."
Bromley promised; and a little later, Ballard, sitting in the moonlight
on the office porch, heard the trains pull out of the yard and saw the
twinkling red eyes of the tail-lights vanish among the rounded hills.
"Good-by, Mr. Howard Pelham. I shouldn't be shocked speechless if you
never came back to Arcadia," he muttered, apostrophising the departing
president of Arcadia Irrigation. Then he put away the business
entanglement and let his gaze wander in the opposite direction; toward
the great house in the upper valley.
At the first eastward glance he sprang up with an exclamation of
astonishment. The old king's palace was looming vast in the moonlight,
with a broad sea of silver to take the place of the brown valley level
in the bridging of the middle distance. But the curious thing was the
lights, unmistakable electrics, as aforetime, twinkling through the
tree-crownings of the knoll.
The Kentuckian left the porch and went to the edge of the mesa cliff to
look down upon the flood, rising now by imperceptible gradations as the
enlarging area of the reservoir lake demanded more water. The lapping
tide was fully half way up the back wall of the dam, which meant that
the colonel's power plant at the mouth of the upper canyon must be
submerged past using. Yet the lights were on at Castle 'Cadia.
While he was speculating over this new mystery, the head-lamps of an
automobile came in sight on the roundabout road below the dam, and
presently a huge tonneau car, well filled, rolled noiselessly over the
plank bridge and pointed its goblin eyes up the incline leading to the
camp mesa. When it came to a stand at the cliff's edge, Ballard saw that
it held Mrs. Van Bryck, Bigelow, and one of the Cantrell girls in the
tonneau; and that Elsa was sharing the driving-seat with young
Blacklock.
"Good evening, Mr. Ballard," said a voice from the shared half of the
driving-seat. And then: "We are trying out the new car--isn't it a
beauty?--and we decided to make a neighbourly call. Aren't you delighted
to see us? Please say you are, anyway. It is the least you can do."
XXII
A CRY IN THE NIGHT
The little French office clock--Bromley's testimonial from his
enthusiastic and admiring classmates of the _Ecole Polytechnique_--had
chimed the hour of ten; the August moon rose high in a firmament of
infinite depths above the deserted bunk shanties and the silent
machinery on the camp mesa; the big touring car, long since cooled from
its racing climb over the hills of the roundabout road, cast a grotesque
and fore-shortened shadow like that of a dwarfed band-wagon on the
stone-chip whiteness of the cutting yard; and still the members of the
auto party lingered on the porch of the adobe bungalow.
For Ballard, though he was playing the part of the unprepared host, the
prolonged stay of the Castle-'Cadians was an unalloyed joy. When he had
established Mrs. Van Bryck in the big easy-chair, reminiscent of
Engineer Macpherson and his canny skill with carpenter's tools, and had
dragged out the blanket-covered divan for Miss Cantrell and Bigelow, he
was free. And freedom, at that moment, meant the privilege of sitting a
little apart on the porch step with Elsa Craigmiles.
For the first time in weeks the Kentuckian was able to invite his soul
and to think and speak in terms of comfortable unembarrassment. The long
strain of the industrial battle was off, and Mr. Pelham's triumphal
beating of drums had been accomplished without loss of life, and with no
more serious consequences than a lamed arm for the man who was best able
to keep his own counsel. Having definitely determined to send in his
resignation in the morning, and thus to avoid any possible entanglement
which might arise when the instability of the great dam's foundations
should become generally known, the burden of responsibility was
immeasurably lightened. And to cap the ecstatic climax in its
sentimental part, Elsa's mood was not mocking; it was sympathetic to a
heart-mellowing degree.
One thing only sounded a jarring note in the soothing theme. That was
young Blacklock's very palpable anxiety and restlessness. When the
collegian had placed the big car, and had stopped its motor and
extinguished its lights, he had betaken himself to the desert of stone
chips, rambling therein aimlessly, but never, as Ballard observed,
wandering out of eye-reach of the great gray wall of masonry, of the
growing lake in the crooking elbow of the canyon, and the path-girted
hillside of the opposite shore. Blacklock's too ostentatious
time-killing was the latest of the small mysteries; and when the
Kentuckian came to earth long enough to remark it, he fancied that Jerry
was waiting for a cue of some kind--waiting and quite obviously
watching.
It was some time after Mrs. Van Bryck, plaintively protesting against
being kept out so late, had begun to doze in her chair, and Bigelow had
fetched wraps from the car wherewith to cloak a shuddery Miss Cantrell,
that Ballard's companion said, guardedly: "Don't you think it would be
in the nature of a charity to these two behind us if we were to share
Jerry's wanderings for a while?"
"I'm not sharing with Jerry--or any other man--just now," Ballard
objected. None the less, he rose and strolled with her across the stone
yard; and at the foot of the great derrick he pulled out one of the
cutter's benches for a seat. "This is better than the porch step," he
was saying, when Blacklock got up from behind a rejected thorough-stone
a few yards away and called to him.
"Just a minute, Mr. Ballard: I've got a corking big rattler under this
rock. Bring a stick, if you can find one."
Ballard found a stick and went to the help of the snake-catcher.
"Don't give him a chance at you, Jerry," he warned. "Where is he?"
The collegian drew him around to the farther side of the great
thorough-block.
"It was only a leg-pull," was the low-toned explanation. "I've been
trying all evening to get a word with you, and I had to invent the
snake. Wingfield says we're all off wrong on the mystery chase--'way
off. You're to watch the dam--that's what he told me to tell you; watch
it close till he comes down here from Castle 'Cadia."
"Watch the dam?" queried the engineer. "What am I to look for?"
"I don't know another blessed thing about it. But there's something
doing; something bigger than--'sh! Miss Elsa's asking about the snake.
Cut it out--cut it all out!"
"It was a false alarm," Ballard explained, when he rejoined his
companion at the derrick's foot. "Jerry has an aggravated attack of
imaginationitis. You were saying----?"
"I wasn't saying anything; but I shall begin now--if you'll sit down.
You must be dying to know why we came down here to-night, of all the
nights that ever were; and why we are staying so long past our welcome."
"I never felt less like dying since the world began; and you couldn't
outstay your welcome if you should try," he answered, out of a full
heart. "My opportunities to sit quietly in blissful nearness to you
haven't been so frequent that I can afford to spoil this one with
foolish queryings about the whys and wherefores."
"Hush!" she broke in imperatively. "You are saying light things again in
the very thick of the miseries! Have you forgotten that to-day--a few
hours ago--another attempt was made upon your life?"
"No; I haven't forgotten," he admitted.
"Be honest with me," she insisted. "You are not as indifferent as you
would like to have me believe. Do you know who made the attempt?"
"Yes." He answered without realising that the single word levelled all
the carefully raised barriers of concealment; and when the realisation
came, he could have bitten his tongue for its incautious slip.
"Then you doubtless know who is responsible for all the terrible
happenings; the--the _crimes_?"
Denial was useless now, and he said "Yes," again.
"How long have you known this?"
"I have suspected it almost from the first."
She turned upon him like some wild creature at bay.
"Why are you waiting? Why haven't you had him arrested and tried and
condemned, like any other common murderer?"
He regarded her gravely, as the hard, white moonlight permitted. No man
ever plumbs a woman's heart in its ultimate depths; least of all the
heart of the woman he knows best and loves most.
"You seem to overlook the fact that I am his daughter's lover," he said,
as if the simple fact settled the matter beyond question.
"And you have never sought for an explanation?--beyond the one which
would stamp him as the vilest, the most inhuman of criminals?" she went
on, ignoring his reason for condoning the crimes.
"I have; though quite without success, I think--until to-day."
"But to-day?" she questioned, anxiously, eagerly.
He hesitated, picking and choosing among the words. And in the end he
merely begged her to help him. "To-day, hope led me over into the valley
of a great shadow. Tell me, Elsa, dear: is your father always fully
accountable for his actions?"
Her hands were tightly clasped in her lap, and there were tense lines of
suffering about the sweet mouth.
"You have guessed the secret--my secret," she said, with the heart-break
in her tone. And then: "Oh, you don't know, you can't imagine, what
terrible agonies I have endured: and alone, always alone!"
"Tell me," he commanded lovingly. "I have a good right to know."
"The best right of all: the right of a patient and loving friend." She
stopped, and then went on in the monotone of despair: "It is in the
blood--a dreadful heritage. Do you--do you know how your father died,
Breckenridge?"
"Not circumstantially; in an illness, I have been told. I was too young
to know anything more than I was told; too young to feel the loss. Did
some one tell me it was a fever?"
"It was not a fever," she said sorrowfully. "He was poisoned--by a
horrible mistake. My father and his brother Abner were practising
physicians in Lexington, your old home and ours; both of them young,
ardent and enthusiastic in their profession. Uncle Abner was called to
prescribe for your father--his life-long friend--in a trivial sickness.
By some frightful mistake, the wrong drug was given and your father
died. Poor Uncle Abner paid for it with his reason, and, a few months
later, with his own life. And a little while after his brother's death
in the asylum, Father threw up his practice and his profession, and came
here to bury himself in Arcadia."
The Kentuckian remembered Colonel Craigmiles's sudden seizure at his
first sight of the dead Ballard's son, and saw the pointing of it.
Nevertheless, he said, soberly: "That proves nothing, you know."
"Nothing of itself, perhaps. But it explains all the fearful things I
have seen with my own eyes. Two years ago, after the trouble with Mr.
Braithwaite, father seemed to change. He became bitterly vindictive
against the Arcadia Company, and at times seemed to put his whole soul
into the fight against it. Then the accidents began to happen, and--oh,
I can't tell you the dreadful things I have seen, or the more dreadful
ones I have suspected! I have watched him--followed him--when he did not
suspect it. After dinner, the night you arrived, he left us all on the
portico at Castle 'Cadia, telling me that he was obliged to come down
here to the mine. Are you listening?"
"You needn't ask that: please go on."
"I thought it very strange; that he would let even a business errand
take him away from us on our first evening; and so I--I made an excuse
to the others and followed him. Breckenridge, I saw him throw the stone
from the top of that cliff--the stone that came so near killing you or
Mr. Bromley, or both of you."
There had been a time when he would have tried to convince her that she
must doubt the evidence of her own senses; but now it was too late: that
milestone had been passed in the first broken sentence of her pitiful
confession.
"There was no harm done, that time," he said, groping loyally for the
available word of comforting.
"It was God's mercy," she asserted. "But listen again: that other night,
when Mr. Bromley was hurt ... After you had gone with the man who came
for you, I hurried to find my father, meaning to ask him to send Otto in
the little car to see if there was anything we could do. Aunt June said
that father was lying down in the library: he was not there. I ran
up-stairs. His coat and waistcoat were on the bed, and his
mackintosh--the one he always wears when he goes out after sundown--was
gone. After a little while he came in, hurriedly, secretly, and he would
not believe me when I told him Mr. Bromley was hurt; he seemed to be
sure it must be some one else. Then I knew. He had gone out to waylay
you on your walk back to the camp, and by some means had mistaken Mr.
Bromley for you."
She was in the full flood-tide of the heart-broken confession now, and
in sheer pity he tried to stop her.
"Let it all go," he counselled tenderly. "What is done, is done; and now
that the work here is also done, there will be no more trouble for you."
"No; I must go on," she insisted. "Since others, who have no right to
know, have found out, I must tell you."
"Others?" he queried.
"Yes: Mr. Wingfield, for one. Unlike you, he has not tried to be
charitable. He believes----"
"He doesn't love you as I do," Ballard interrupted quickly.
"He doesn't love me at all--that way; it's Dosia. Hadn't you suspected?
That was why he joined Aunt Janet's party--to be with Dosia."
"Thus vanishes the final shadow: there is nothing to come between us
now," he exulted; and his unhurt arm drew her close.
"Don't!" she shuddered, shrinking away from him. "That is the bitterest
drop in the cup of misery. You refuse to think of the awful heritage I
should bring you; but I think of it--day and night. When your telegram
came from Boston to Mr. Lassley at New York, I was going with the
Lassleys--not to Norway, but to Paris, to try to persuade Doctor Perard,
the great alienist, to come over and be our guest at Castle 'Cadia. It
seemed to be the only remaining hope. But when you telegraphed your
changed plans, I knew I couldn't go; I knew I must come home. And in
spite of all, he has tried three times to kill you. You know he must be
insane; tell me you know it," she pleaded.
"Since it lifts a burden too heavy to be borne, I am very willing to
believe it," he rejoined gravely. "I understand quite fully now. And it
makes no difference--between us, I mean. You must not let it make a
difference. Let the past be past, and let us come back to the present.
Where is your father now?"
"After dinner he went with Mr. Wingfield and Otto to the upper canyon.
There is a breakwater at the canyon portal which they hoped might save
the power-house and laboratory from being undermined by the river, and
they were going to strengthen it with bags of sand. I was afraid of what
might come afterward--that you might be here alone and unsuspecting. So
I persuaded Cousin Janet and the others to make up the car-party."
From where they were sitting at the derrick's foot, the great boom
leaned out like a giant's arm uplifted above the canyon lake. With the
moon sweeping toward the zenith, the shadow of the huge iron beam was
clearly cut on the surface of the water. Ballard's eye had been
mechanically marking the line of shadow and its changing position as the
water level rose in the Elbow.
"The reservoir is filling a great deal faster than I supposed it would,"
he said, bearing his companion resolutely away from the painful things.